A followup on this thread, and particularly this post where Sam Stone suggests approaches/solutions not involving treaties or government regulation.
For purposes of this thread, let us assume the mainstream view of climate scientists, most recently expressed in the IPCC report, is correct: Earth’s climate has been changing, average global temperatures have been warming, and this results at least in part from human industrial activity.
What can or should we do about it?
And if I might add…what will it cost in realistic terms. I once did a thread just like this and never did get a very definitive answer. Would Kyoto, if the US came fully on board be enough? What WOULD be enough? If the science is as exact as people are making it, it should be fairly easy to at least ball park what would need to be done to reverse the trend…and what it would cost to do so. So, all you GW advocates, lets see some numbers. 
(FTR I’m a GW agnostic atm…I’m unsure that the science is as solid as the bandwagon seems to think it is, but am willing to conceed that it probably is and the uncertainty is my own ignorance of such a complex subject, despite my attempts to read up on it and figure out what the fuck they are all talking about.)
-XT
Would a carbon emission tax count as government regulation? For every pound of carbon emitted into the atmosphere, pay $X. Increase the tax by 10% every year. Let the market figure out the solution. This seems like the best long-term solution to me.
Another solution, but short-term: stratospheric dust injection. Mt Pinatubo lowered the mean temperature by, what, 1 deg C? Build several 2000-m chimneys and pump silica dust (or some other harmless, cheap material) above the tropopause. The stuff will precipitate out relatively quickly, but in the mean time, solar radiation is reduced.
I would triple appropriation to National Science Foundation (NSF) each year for the next two years. The United States Congress appropriates about $5 billion dollars to general science research. That’s it. The $27 billion dollars pouring into the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is strictly for basic and medical sciences. Engineers, climatologists, mathematics, physicists, and other allied disciplines are, for the most part, shut out from NIH funding. They all feed from the $5 billion trough.
By increasing funding, I believe it’ll not only accelerate our search for alternative sources of energy but I think it’ll attract bright individuals into pursuing academic careers in engineering and climatology. I imagine that by increasing the funding, research universities all over the country will start handing out lab space like candy.
I might have faulty information but I thought the new report showed that even if we changed our ways we couldn’t really fix things. If that’s the case, then we’re going to have to learn to live with it.
Not that I’m arguing against doing anything about it I’m just not sure if this is something that can be fixed.
Marc
Well, it did show that there is additional warming in the pipeline. However, this is not really an all-or-nothing thing. Yes, we definitely are going to need to adapt to a certain amount of additional climate change that we are committed to by the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere (and, realistically, more from the additional amounts we are going to continue to pump into the atmosphere even if we start to reduce this…because we can only reduce it so rapidly). However, the negative consequences of climate change increase (probably quite nonlinearly!) as the amount increases…as does the probability of sending the climate system off into some totally different state (i.e., triggering some sort of abrupt change). So, there is still likely a lot to be gained by minimizing the amount of additional change we produce.
Some scientists are beginning to look into how feasible this option is, in combination with mitigation efforts. For example, see this paper whose abstract reads:
Assuming it’s real, we should switch to nuclear fission energy as much as possible for primary electricity needs, supplemented by solar, wind, and tidal energy. A big issue here is nuclear proliferation. If AGW is real, this may well be something which we have to accept, and equally have to accept the limited nuclear conflict that will inevitably follow.
For fuel, remember it’s not the consumption of hydrocarbons that’s the problem but the release of the burned fuel. While large ships can have nuclear reactors, consumers and governments should encourage vehicle manufacturers to produce cars which produce little if no emissions. How car manufacturers can do this, I leave to better minds, but governments should not increase fuel taxes (Ken Livingstone has a good idea by reducing taxes on hybrid vehicles). Maybe in future going to the petrol station will involve not only pumping in petrol but also removing frozen blocks of water and CO2. A bit like an oil change.
What to do with the byproducts? Well, we know that extra CO2 benefits plants, so how about taking them to the plant nurseries and those orchards etc under cover?
Hydrocarbons are also used to produce many things. Like plastics and fertiliser. These are much more CO2 neutral, as long as they’re not burnt, and so little needs to be done - for example, with fertiliser, we’re essentially recycling it, removing it from the depths of the earth to the surface.
Why would wider proliferation of nuclear power plants inevitably lead to nuclear conflict (i.e., use of nuclear weapons in war), limited or otherwise?
I would add: provide tax incentives to build nuclear power plants-generous tax breaks to communities who allow nuclear plants to build in their communities. also: discourage imports-shipping junk from China wastes lots of bunker oil-make the stuff here. Also, provide tax incentives for fuel-efficient cars-and tax vehicles by engine size. Plant tree-lots of trees, and encourage the production of bio fuels. Lastly eliminate the stupid laws that cause energy waste (example: the City of Boston, laboring under a 34-year old desegregation order) spends $66 million/year to haul kids from one end of the city to the other, in an effort to “racially balance” the schools.
I’d also mandat a 4-day week for government offices, and limit congress to 2 months/year sessions.
And keep nancy pelosi from getting a jet plane to fly around in.
What’s that got to do with this?
Slashing civil service pay is politically (and might be legally) impossible. Sure you want to pay them the same to work less?
Although I can’t provide a cite, as I’m not even sure how to search for such a claim, I’d swear I’ve seen assertions that investment in cleaner environmental technologies in the past have paid off in terms of the new tech being valuable and moneymaking in and of itself. That is, that gov’t-mandated rules for lowering pollution have spurred investment in and development of technology that paid off at least comparably to industry-driven research into purely marketable technology. Not an assertion that this is always the case, but at least that it’s occurred enough to make it possible that “the cost of new regulation” could overall be nullified by possession of resulting desirable new tech.
Maybe it was catalytic converters I’m thinking of?
Anyway, even if we don’t believe that research could/would lead to global dominance in new climate-friendly technology, we should also ask ourselves the converse question:
What is the “cost in realistic terms” of the status quo? If unchecked Anthropogenic Global Warming submerges the East Coast of the United States up to the Appalachians, can we add up all the costs of destruction, relocation, refugee problems, crops and investments destroyed…of the historically most dynamic part of the world’s only superpower, and the center of the world’s economy and technological base…
And…of course…the sheer real estate lost…then compound it annually at a rising rate (such as is typical of the cost of real estate over the long term) for…well…for the forseeable future?
What would that figure look like?
(all the money yet minted on the planet) per year x (the indefinite future)?
That’s a hell of a cost. Sure, I pulled it out of my nether region, but so would be pulled any estimate of the cost of fighting global warming. Let’s not lose sight of the staggering potential cost of unchecked global warming just because capitalists and industrialists want us to focus on the prevention side of the costs.
They ask: what is the monetary cost of this effort?
I ask: what is the cash value of an inhabitable Earth?
Sailboat
I think the anthropogenic portion of climate change is a bit of a red herring. It really doesn’t matter whether climate is changing because of increased solar radiation or increased CO2, what matters is what we should do about it, and what we CAN do about it.
Imagining the cost if we do nothing, and comparing that to the cost of doing something, and picking the smaller cost is all very well. But the trouble is that it requires no agreement to do nothing, it requires agreement to do something. So a trillion dollars lost through climate change requires no government action, it just happens. But collecting a half-trillion dollars to mitigate climate change is very difficult, because while everyone benefits from avoiding ecological disaster, each individual person is better off if they avoid paying for it and make other people pay for it. Classic tragedy of the commons.
Collecting a trillion dollars at gunpoint might very well be impossible, even to avoid a two trillion dollar disaster.
And of course, there are all sorts of people who are salivating at the idea of a massive increase in government control over the economy and personal behavior. Finally, the smart folks in the government are going to be giving orders and everyone else is going to be following them. Increased taxes, increased regulation, increased spending, it’s all good.
Granting for the moment that a nuclear conflict will inevitably follow, I disagree. A slow climate change that can be relatively easily adapted to is far to be preferred over even a reasonable chance of a nuclear exchange. For the record, I believe in increased reliance nuclear power, but security must be very tight at these facilities.
I am going to mostly parrot what Scientific America laid out as the outline of a plan last year with my own mental notes: This is all from memory, so have some mercy on me.
*Please note all my statements should be read with the disclaimer of according to the currently most accepted theories: *
Can we halt the worst effects? Yes, we can, the increase is still occurring and we have not yet hit the critical concentration of Green House gases in the atmosphere.
We need to think of the attempt as a 50-year plan and a 100-year plan.
Remember that the plan we come up with today is not the plan we will finish with. There will be some missteps and some happy surprises.
There is no one single solution for every country and geographic area. We need to work with flexible plans in different areas.
**Some of the many contributing solutions: **
a) Increase efficiency in energy use is the easiest to attain goal.
____I) Lighting: We need a big push toward Compact Fluorescent bulbs, LED lighting, Fiber optic lighting, motion sensitive switches. Give some incentives to get LED holiday lights to market in the next few years. Speed up the process.
____II) Heating and Cooling: We need to better insulation in homes, improved windows insulation, improve building to the local climate, incentive to install high efficiency furnaces, boilers, water heaters and air conditioners.
____III) Appliances: Put some teeth and incentives into Energy Star. Push the requirement up and give either rebates for the highly efficient or tax penalties to the inefficient. Provide some tax relief for appliance upgrades to highly efficient models.
____IV) Electronics: Believe it or not, all of our little idiot lights, clocks etc add up to a lot of energy consumption when considering an entire household. Improve the energy efficiency on these products. Give some tax incentives for LCD HDTV over the competing models that use up to twice as much energy as the same size LCD. Keep pushing better standards for printer and computer energy use and especially their sleep modes. A printer not in use but left on can draw anywhere from less than .1 amps to over 2 amps while idling.
b) Automotive: We do not know the right solution, so we need to try several and bet on a few.
____I) A safe bet is continued incentives for low emission Hybrids. Increased gas efficiency and decreased greenhouse gases.
____II) Start a sliding tax on vehicles to encourage the purchase of more efficient vehicles. This can be fairly simple: If a private vehicle gets under 20 mpg, charge and extra 50 cent per gallon if it gets over 40 mpg, give a 50 cent per gallon break. Play with the numbers until it works and adjusts as needs every few years.
____ III) Give incentives to car companies to develop plug-in hybrids that burn gas or E85.
____ IV) Investigate E85 from sources more efficient than corn, hell even Bush talked about this one.
____ V) Continue looking into Hydrogen cars and buses and the required infrastructure starting with large cities.
**c)**Energy production: We need to improve efficiency in transmission, production and clean up production.
____ I) Start shutting down or retrofitting the dirty coal plants and replace with the cleanest possible coal plants as we will continue to use this cheapest form of energy that we have currently. Una could write a staff report on what can be done to improve this part of the energy equation.
____ II) Sorry fellow greens, it is time to build more and better nuclear power plants. I know, it is a tough pill to shallow, but they need to be part of the solution, they produce no greenhouse gas.
____ III) Build much more Solar farms, house, and building with Solar panels. Increase the tax breaks and rebates for adding solar panels to houses. I have a 6700-watt system. NJ paid 70% of the cost for it. We need more programs like this.
____ IV) Build more wind farms, build a lot of wind farms. Educate people that wind farms can be very scenic. Again, fellow Greens, I am sorry, but some birds are going to die. Not as many as will die if we allow Global Warming to continue the way it is projected to at present.
____ V) We are now experimenting with very low resistance transmission lines to reduce the rather large loss of energy in the grid. We need to push ahead in this area and poor more money into it and similar research.
____ VI) Increase the money into fusion research.
____ VII) Put some money into the more fringe concepts like Geo-thermal vents 6 miles deep to generate energy, Solar Sails in orbit, Giant Solar Towers like Australia is looking into.
____VIII) Look into more Tidal generation and more Hydropower.
**d)**Look into planting a lot more trees and ensure the trees become furniture and houses or go into landfills and so the carbon gets stored.
e) Look into methods to get the Oceans to store more carbon. We have an ongoing thread on what looks like an unlikely solution, but there might be other methods of doing this.
I apologize; I have run out of steam. There is more and I am forgetting it.
Jim
The technology to make and refine enriched fuel for high efficiency nuclear fission production is essentially the same as for producing weapon grade material. It would not be illogical to conclude that encouraging nations to develop domestic nuclear production capability would lead to proliferation of nuclear weapons and a significant increase in the likelyhood of regional nuclear conflict.
One way to get around this would be to have a central international authority which produces non-weapons grade enriched material (poisoned with unstable isotopes which preclude use in an implosion-type fission device) and sells it to other nations at cost or subsidized by wealthier nations. This would be a political nightmare–the institution would have to be entirely apolitical, lest it become an OPEC-like organization–but technically feasable and even more efficient that individual facilities of varying levels of security and hazard abatement.
Natural renewable sources (wind, solar, geothermal) are probably preferrable for nations with an undeveloped distribution infrastructure, but can’t compete on the same scale or act as a complete replacement for fossil fuel plants. There’s a limit to where and how big you can make them.
We’re going to have to cope with the effects of climate change one way or another. However, it’s worth noting that some of the effects may actually be positive in the long term, in terms of growing seasons and arable land. However, it’ll definitely be detrimental to species which depend on a limited habitat. Colibri can probably speak in detail on this topic. The greatest hazard is probably to ocean life; heat the average ocean temperature even just a few degrees and you’ll have a significant and detrimental impact upon marine life which will feed up the chain. There’s very little we can do to affect this other than attempt to slow the process of warming. Plans to do this (by ejecting particulates into the atmosphere, sequesterization of carbon, et cetera) are all highly speculative at this point and largely fail to account for secondary effects that may be equallty deleterious.
Stranger
While I agree that we should definitely be making our solutions as market-friendly as we feasibly can, I think it’s hopeless to attempt to address the problem of climate change due to anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions solely in a non-regulatory manner.
I mean, look, if the situation is more or less as the current scientific consensus describes it, then the fundamental problem is that we are treating a resource as free that in fact is not free—i.e., the ability of the atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gases. The market has no power over the use of resources that are universally assumed to be free.
For all of human history, we’ve been assuming that the atmosphere is a universal and infinitely accessible free dumping ground for our greenhouse gases. And for most of human history, that hasn’t caused any trouble climate-wise, because our emissions were too puny to make a significant difference to the composition of the atmosphere. Even when we decided we had to restrict other kinds of air pollution, like soot for example, we continued to consider the dumping of carbon dioxide and some other greenhouse gases as totally free and unrestricted.
In economist-speak, we were externalizing the costs of CO2 disposal onto the environment. This was fine and dandy as long as we weren’t dumping enough extra CO2 to have a significant negative impact on the environment, but it looks as though that’s changed. We now have to “marketize” (or internalize) the costs of our greenhouse gas emissions.
That means that in order to be able to apply market solutions to the problem of excessive greenhouse-gas emissions, we have to make people regard emitting greenhouse gases as a market activity. And—sorry, libertarians—the only way to do that is through the power of that ol’ debbil Big Government.
Yes, markets can operate very efficiently once they’re established as such. But it’s society that establishes what is and what isn’t subject to market forces—what you are allowed (or required) to buy or sell as opposed to just getting for free. And in modern nation-states, “society” means law and “law” means government. If we want to give people market incentives to reduce the amounts of atmospheric CO2 they put out, then we have to figure out how to put a price on CO2 emissions and how to charge emitters for them. Yup, that means government regulation, and yup, that means treaties.
Sure, but there’s regulation and then there’s regulation. One government regulation of the marketplace is that you’re not allowed to point a gun at a storekeeper and demand that he hand over his money. Another is that he’s not allowed to point a gun at you and demand that you work for free. And so on. A “free market” can’t exist without the rule of law, or custom so strong it might as well be law.
Of course the problem is that the atmosphere is a giant commons. Everyone is free to absorb as much oxygen as they like and exhale as much carbon dioxide and water vapor as they like, and fart out as much methane as they like. If we were just talking human biological processes here, then treating the atmosphere as a commons, even with 6 billion people, would be fine.
And of course there are all sorts of natural processes that subtract or add oxygen, CO2, H20, CH4, Cl, and all sorts of other crap into and out of the atmosphere. And controlling those natural processes is pretty much impossible.
And on top of that we have several different types of anthropogenic emissions/absorptions. Not just industrial processes, or burning, but simple things like agriculture and animal husbandry practices. Burning gasoline obviously creates CO2 and H2O and removes O2, but so does clearing land for farming. So does tilling land. So does irrigating and fertillizing that land. So does harvesting crops. So does grazing livestock. So does simply building a road or a swimming pool or a lawn or a house.
When all these activities are very small compared to the “natural” processes there’s not much to get excited about. Except, if natural processes are changing the climate in ways we don’t like, it doesn’t matter if anthropenic processes are large or small relative to the natural processes, the climate is still changing in ways we don’t like, and we can either contribute to that change or mitigate that change.
So, back to government regulation. The simplest way to reduce CO2 emmissions is simply to tax CO2 emissions. But we will never do that, because that would be politically impossible. So instead we’ll mandate that every house be built a certain way, that the vehicle fleet be manufactured in a certain way, that certain types of lightbulbs are required and others are prohibited, that certain things will get tax breaks, that certain corporate activities will get bucketfulls of money from the goverment. And so on. God forbid we tax gasoline, which people can see the cost of. No, what we’ll do is intensive regulation where the costs are very difficult to see.
The federal CAFE standards are a perfect example. We want fuel efficient cars AND cheap gasoline AND decreased gasoline consumption. The simple way to decrease gasoline comsumption is to mandate an increase in the price, impose a gas tax. But we can’t do that because everyone wants cheap gas, heck, we’ll try to SUBSIDIZE gasoline in all sorts of hidden ways (the Iraq war is one such attempt). So we’ll mandate that automakers manufacture their car fleets with a certain range of mileage, never mind what people actually want.
This is what enrages me. See, look, I’m enraged. The simple, economically transparent solutions are those that cannot be done, precisely BECAUSE they are economically transparent and the voting population can SEE how much they cost. And so we propose solutions that won’t work very well to curb emissions and at the same time will cost outrageous amounts of money, but that doesn’t matter, because no one actually has to PAY that money, it’s just wealth that will never be created. And that future economic growth doesn’t count, we’d rather eat our seed corn today.
If the world economy goes into decline the FIRST thing that will be discarded are these regulations designed to improve the ecology. China doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the ecology, and if America and Europe start seeing economic slowdowns we won’t give a rats ass either…even if the economic damage is CAUSED by anthropogenic climate change! :smack:
An ignorant’s question. Is there a man-made way to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere?
I am thinking big and ugly terraforming machines on Earth. No matter the cost or that they require a nuclear plant just to power them up or that they produce a waste that is worse than nuclear waste and needs to be stored. Can it be done? Is there such technology? I know the technology is there, of course, there are CO2 scrubs in our spaceships, is that scalable?
There are several possible ways to do that, and many more will probably be developed in the future. Most of the ideas are currently still at the emerging-technology stage, but some are already in use: